A History of Zionism (78 page)

What of the more distant prospect? Not liberalism, but only the victorious proletariat could bring complete emancipation. Then the Jews would be absorbed, would cease to exist as such. This was not to be deplored. The disappearance of the ghetto would not give rise to melancholy longings. Being city dwellers the Jews had the qualities most required for the progress of humanity. In western Europe, though few in number, they had produced Spinoza, Heine, Lassalle, Marx. But these spiritual giants had become effective only after they had burst the fetters of Judaism. Their work lay outside the sphere of Judaism, within the realm of modern culture, often in conscious opposition to Judaism. ‘The Jews have become an eminently revolutionary factor [Kautsky wrote], while Judaism has become a reactionary factor. It is like a weight of lead attached to the feet of the Jews who eagerly seek to progress … the sooner [this social ghetto] disappears, the better it will be not only for society, but also for the Jews themselves.’
*
The disappearance of the Jews would not be a tragedy, like the disappearance of the American Indians or the Tasmanians. For it would not be a decline into degradation but an ascent to an immense field of activity, making possible the creation of a new and higher type of man. ‘The Wandering Jew will thus at last find a haven of rest. He will continue to live in the memory of man as man’s greatest sufferer, as he who has been dealt with most severely by mankind, to whom he has given most.’

Kautsky’s views have been given at some length because they were the most consistent and systematic in their exposition of the Marxist arguments against Zionism. The critics of a later day, Communist, Trotskyite, or New Left, base their arguments in all essentials on his, occasionally with differences of detail and emphasis. The Zionist response to the Marxist critique can be summarised as follows: Marxism has been mistaken in underrating the importance of nationalism in recent history. National antagonisms have not declined in importance, even in countries in which Communism has prevailed. The Marxist analysis (like the liberal analysis) may be correct
sub specie aeternatis
, history may move in the direction of one world, with equality for all races, nations, and peoples. But Zionism is not concerned with these distant prospects. It emerged precisely because, in contrast to the liberal and Marxist analysis, it assumed that the Jewish question would not disappear in the foreseeable future. On the contrary, it was likely to become much more acute. The appeal to the Jews to participate in the revolutionary struggle in their homeland was no doubt well meant, but even on the assumption that the interests of the Jews and the revolution were identical, it was not practical politics.

The Polish, German or Austrian working-class neither needed nor wanted the Jews as allies. They wanted to get rid of them, or at best regarded them as an embarrassment in their political struggle. Jews had played a leading part in the early phases of all Socialist and Communist parties, but since then they had everywhere been squeezed out. Among the founders and early leaders of the German Communist Party there were a great many Jews. The year before Hitler came to power there was not a single one among the hundred Communist deputies in the Reichstag. Events took a similar course in the Soviet Union. This was not necessarily a disaster in Zionist eyes, but it certainly underlined the argument that the position of the Jews in the revolutionary movement was highly problematical. A New Left critic of Zionism wrote in 1970 that subsequent events had shown that Trotsky and Zinoviev, Kamenev and Radek had been right, not the Zionists. But since all these Bolshevik leaders fell victims to Stalinism, the argument is not exactly convincing.
*
With antisemitism on the rise, the Jews in Europe were condemned to be passive onlookers, not active participants in the revolutionary struggle.

The Marxist critics did not foresee the victory of fascism and the extermination of the majority of European Jewry. It had been argued that the temporary victory of the counter-revolution, despite its appalling consequences, did not necessarily refute the Socialist thesis about the ultimate absorption and assimilation of the Jews in their native countries. But since Marxist analysis and prediction had been belied by recent history, there was no assurance that it would be borne out by future developments. The Marxist-Leninist thesis was based on the assumption that Communist régimes would successfully tackle the Jewish problem and that as a result the Jews as a group would disappear. But if there were no Jews left in Communist Poland in 1970 this happened not as the result of the emergence of a ‘new and higher type of man’, as Kautsky predicted, but in a manner reminiscent of the exodus of Jews from Spain in the fifteenth century. The Jews had been difficult to absorb for capitalist and Communist societies alike. Was it the ‘reactionary character of Judaism’ that was responsible for this, or the fact that the Jews were an ‘eminently revolutionary factor’ and thus likely to disturb the peace of post-revolutionary régimes? The possibility of Jewish assimilation in a truly internationalist society such as Lenin envisaged could not be excluded, but such a society had never existed and developments in the Soviet Union and the other Communist countries had moved steadily away from the internationalist ideal towards a new form of national socialism. In these conditions total assimilation had become difficult if not impossible.

Present difficulties quite apart, Zionists claim that recent history has shown that the Marxist concept of nationalism, of the nation-state in general and of antisemitism in particular, is at best grossly oversimplified. According to Marx and his disciples, such as Kautsky, the Jew was the representative of modern capitalism, or to be precise, commercial capitalism, and having lost this function was bound to disappear. But this concept never made much sense in eastern Europe, where the majority of Jews was concentrated, nor does it provide an explanation for pre- and post-capitalist antisemitism.

The Austrian Marxists, who faced the nationality problem in an acute form, were aware of the weakness of this aspect of Marxist theory, and provided in the works of Otto Bauer and Karl Renner a more sophisticated analysis. Whereas Kautsky had originally regarded a common language as the decisive criterion for the existence of a nation (later he added a second criterion: territory), Otto Bauer defined a nation as a community of fate, culture and character: ‘An aggregate of people bound into a community of character by a community of fate.’
*
The Jews were still a nation, especially those in eastern Europe, but everywhere they were in the process of ceasing to be one. As an ‘absolute minority’, one lacking a common territory, they were, unlike the Czechs, doomed as a nation, bound to be absorbed into the cultural community of the European nations.
†
While not rejecting Jewish national culture, and opposing compulsory assimilation, Bauer thought it would be wrong for the Jews to insist on national autonomy because this would retard the inevitable historical process.

This remained the attitude of the Jewish leaders and theoreticians of Austro-Marxism, and the advent of fascism did not make them change their mind. Friedrich Adler wrote in 1949 that he and his father (one of the founders of the party) had always considered the complete assimilation of the Jews both desirable and possible. Even the bestialities of Hitler had not shaken him in his belief that Jewish nationalism was bound to generate reactionary tendencies, namely the resurrection of a language which had been dead for almost two thousand years and the rebirth of an antiquated religion.
*
The non-Jewish leaders of Austro-Marxism took on occasion a more lenient view of Zionism. Karl Renner developed a highly complicated concept of non-territorial autonomy as the only feasible way to safeguard the interests of minorities in a multinational state. He did not include the Jews in this scheme, but, unlike Bauer, did not
expressis verbis
exclude them. Both Bundists and Zionists welcomed Renner’s scheme and adapted it for their own purposes. According to Pernerstorfer, another Austrian Socialist leader, it was up to the Jews to decide whether they were a nation or not. There was no doubt that they had the right to national existence, but whether the practical difficulties on the road to national autonomy could be over-come was another question. Pernerstorfer thought that the Jews in eastern Europe would survive in the long run only if they got an independent state.
†

Such individual voices apart, the attitude of International Social Democracy towards Zionism remained hostile until the First World War.
Neue Zeit
, the theoretical organ of the German Socialists, dismissed Herzl’s
Judenstaat
as Utopian and unworthy of serious consideration, a beautiful cloak in which a nation no longer alive was to appear on the historical stage for the last time, to disappear after that forever.
‡
A few years later another (Jewish) contributor explained Zionism as the reaction of the Jewish bourgeoisie to modern antisemitism. Social democracy was not against Zionism in principle, he argued, but since the (bourgeois) Zionists were trying to achieve their aim not by a liberation struggle but by bargaining with Turkey, and since they were moreover preaching class solidarity and national separatism and did not reject religion, International Socialism could not support them.
§
In English Socialist circles Zionism was condemned as reactionary through and through, with Russian-Jewish emigrés such as Theodore Rothstein taking a leading part in denouncing the movement.
‖
On occasion, more sympathetic voices were heard. An English Socialist journal promised that once the class struggle was won, the Jews too would find a place in the sun to shape their own national destiny. But on the whole English Socialists did not pay much attention to the issue. French Socialists were even less interested, but certainly not favourably inclined. After the publication in
Revue Socialiste
of a pro-Zionist article commenting on the Kishinev massacre, an editorial note dismissed the belief in Palestine as the home of all Jews as a myth. Zionism was psychologically understandable as a reaction to cruel persecution, but was born of despair and based on a myth. It was, like all other forms of nationalism, reactionary and reprehensible.
*
Before 1914 the only major exception to this wholesale rejection of Zionism on the part of the Left was the circle of the
Sozialistische Monatshefte
, a revisionist journal edited by Josef Bloch in Berlin, which pursued an independent line on this as on many other issues.

After the First World War many Socialists modified their attitude. Kautsky and the Marxist fundamentalists remained opposed, and the attacks emanating from these circles were harsh in both form and content. Zionism, according to a pamphlet by Alexander Szanto (to provide a fairly typical example), was a harmful illusion, the sooner it was liquidated the better for the Jews. There was no earthly chance that they would ever become a majority in Palestine. Zionism was reactionary and chauvinistic; far from contributing to the solution of the Jewish problem it was trying to sabotage the absorption of the Jews in their native countries. In central and western Europe assimilation was about to be completed, Szanto wrote in 1930: ‘Antisemitism is merely engaged in rearguard actions’.
†
Time was working against Zionism, but while it did its mischief it was the duty of every Socialist to combat it, and not to be neutral. For Zionism was not a marginal phenomenon, it was a cancerous disease. ‘Whoever is not against it is for it.’

There was, however, no longer a censensus on these lines in Socialist ranks. Vandervelde, one of the most respected figures of the Second International, and for many years its chairman, visited Palestine in the 1920s. Subsequently he wrote with sympathy about the work of the labour Zionists. Other leading social democrats, including Louis de Brouckère, Vincent Auriol, Camille Huysmans, George Lansbury, Arthur Henderson and Rudolf Breitscheid joined, in 1928, a Socialist Committee for Working Palestine. The right of the Jewish people to a national home in Palestine was recognised in various resolutions of international Socialist congresses between 1917 and 1920. Jean Longuet (Karl Marx’s grandson), one of the leaders of French Socialism, declared in 1918 that the idea of a Jewish national home in Palestine deserved the support of international social democracy. His colleague Leon Blum even became one of the non-Zionist members of the Jewish Agency in 1929.

Of interest also were the changes in the attitude of leading Socialists of the older generation, such as Axelrod and Eduard Bernstein, who had earlier sharply opposed Zionism. Axelrod declared in 1917 that he was now in favour of the realisation of the aims of Zionism. Bernstein, father of the reformist trend in German social democracy, also joined the pro-Palestine Socialist committee in 1928. Before 1914 he, too, had favoured the denationalisation of the Jews who, he said, no longer had any specific mission. He conceded that east European Jews might have to emigrate, but a rescue action on their behalf was not to be coupled with the idea of a Jewish state, which in any case would face insurmountable obstacles. That assimilation was desirable was axiomatic for Bernstein, as it was for Kautsky, his chief antagonist. There was in their view no justification for any specific Jewish solidarity or national separatism. Zionism was obnoxious and reactionary because it impeded assimilation.
*
After the war Bernstein admitted that he had underrated the importance and persistence of antisemitism. He declared that he felt too much a German to become a Zionist, but added that he followed their activities with sympathy; Zionism had inspired its followers to great creative achievements. Poale Zion was an active member of the Second International, much to the dismay of anti-Zionists like Szanto. By and large Zionism remained a marginal issue for European social democracy. Most of its leaders did not believe in the success of the Palestinian experiment, for both ideological and practical reasons, but after 1918 their tone was on the whole sorrowful rather than angry. Those who had any first-hand knowledge of the Jewish problem were now more aware than previously that the issues involved were much more intricate than they had originally believed. By the late 1920s most Socialists had realised that even if Zionism was mistaken, the Second International and its affiliated parties had no ready alternative answer to the Jewish problem.